A childhood well spent, or musings over a relaunch:

When DC Comics relaunched its universe a few months back, I realized I had read an entire universes’ worth of story, from 1986 to 2011. Then I noticed that that was 25 years worth of reading. I remembered that I had been reading comics for a few years before that. So I did some checking on dates. I declared myself a “comic collector” at 12 years of age. I am not sure how long I had been reading comics prior to that. I owned enough that the hobby seemed to have a head start. As I write this I am 42, so that is 30 years of collecting. I figure with all that time in the hobby I would give in to a bit of reminiscing about what I remember about comics, and the superheroes in them.
(As a quick note; I tried to write several notes about why “comics” and “superheroes” are NOT the same thing; however they all turned in to either a weak copy of a chapter in, or a plug for, Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. There are A LOT of reasons you should read said book. The difference between “comics” and “superheroes” is only a small part of why. If you have not read it I recommend that you do.)
It started for me at about 4 or 5. I had a love for “The Electric Company” on PBS. I don’t have a lot of strong memories of the show except for three things: First is the opening theme with “HEY YOU GUYS!!” shouted at the start. Second is the postcards they sent me after my mom sent them a letter I dictated. (I still have it, a cheap form letter response, but for little Brad, it was proof that they were “real”.) Third was the hero guy who didn’t talk, but communicated in written words: Spiderman. My desire to know what he was saying was a huge motivation in learning to read. Yes, a superhero led me to being an early reader. I am not 100% sure that my first comic was a “Spidey Super Stories” but it was the title that dominated my pre-collection collection. I LOVED me some Spiderman.

Once I could read, and realized that there were other comics on the rack, I started asking for more. I was given mostly Archie or Casper, and at first that was fine. In fact, I liked them better than any of the Superhero stuff. Because the Superhero stuff, even the other Spiderman stuff, didn’t always end, or it ended with the bad guy winning. I was in grade school before I understood that the story ended in the next issue. I disliked the idea of not getting the full story, but I LIKED the idea of the story being longer. The problem was I never saw two consecutive issues of a comic. I lived in a small desert town and had to rely on my parents to bring me whatever comic they happened to pick up, thus consecutive issues rarely happened. The first time it did I remember being VERY excited. It was a Spiderman story, where he and The White Tiger (El Tigre Blanco, which may have been the first Spanish other then counting to 10 that I learned) fought The Lightmaster. I only remember small bits of the story (The White Tiger being sick without his necklace is about it) BUT I remember being VERY excited to discover you actually could get two in a row.
My Grandpa Spridgeon and I had a tradition of getting Slurpies at 7-11 whenever I came to visit. (As 7-11 was still about 5 to 10 years from showing up in my neck of the woods, this was the BEST.) Once when we went there were “Superboy cups” (that is what I remember him calling them) BUT there was NO Spiderman (I didn’t know from DC and Marvel at the time) and there was NO Superboy although there had been but they were out. The guy behind the counter found the closest one he could. The character’s name was Mon-El, and his story was told briefly on the back of the cup. I know now that it MUST have been a Legion of Superheroes series of cups, but back then it was a brief introduction to the larger world around Superman.
Then I watched the Superfriends. I was 6 when it came on, so I hope you can forgive me for liking it. According to Wikipedia, what I first watched was a rebroadcast from 73-74, but for me it started during my first grade year as part of Saturday Morning Cartoons. It had the all the big-name heroes working together. I remember thinking that the “NEW Superfriends Hour” was cooler then the original show. I would also think a few years later that “The Challenge of The Superfreinds” was the best of the lot. I have since watched the various versions of the Superfriends. They are painfully bad. Those of you who grew up with the Bruce Timm and Paul Dini cartoons are SOOOOOOOOOO lucky to have childhood superheroes that will not embarrass you as an adult. I loved watching the Superfriends, and as an avid reader who started reading with comics, I WANTED to read the comic. So when I was eight and we went to Washington, D.C. to visit family friends it was the comic I HAD to read on the plane. Dad bought me several comics for the trip; we looked for The Superfriends comic, but could not find it. When he asked me if it might be under a different name I responded with “The Justice League”, which was the name the team went by in the cartoons. My dad found me two “in a row” issues, which was exciting, then put them with the several other comics he had purchased. As it turns out, the Superfriends DID have a comic at the time. If we had succeeded in finding one, my life might have been different.

The two “in a row” issues were “Justice League of America” number 147, “Crisis in the Thirtieth century”, and number 148, “Crisis in Triplicate”. Somewhere over the Midwest, my eight year-old-mind was blown. This was incredible! There were two different Earths, three super teams and a future where an evil wizard threatened spaceships. The second earth had a different Flash, a different Green Lantern AND their “Supergirl” went by the name “Power Girl”. The future they all went to had a team who seemed to know Superman from when he was Superboy. What made it exciting was that BOTH of the other teams appeared to have their own comic book (The Justice Society was in All-Star at the time, and Superboy and the Legion of Superheroes had their own book for years). I fell in love with the idea of both super teams and alternate Earths. Comic books had just become my favorite thing to read, and I was an avid reader so I read A LOT of comics. However, I was a reader of comics, not a collector.
I read LOTS of comics! The ones I liked best combined both Science Fiction and magic. This meant I LOVED superheroes which had both. I also was enamored of Micronauts and Star Wars (while I am talking about the comics here, yes, I also loved the Micronaut toys and ALL things Star Wars). I was devouring ANY reading that had to do with adventure, and comics doubly so. However I was still a reader and not a collector. Then I met Danny.
It was Mr. Garret’s 5th-6th grade combination class where we met. I was in 5th grade, Danny was in 6th. Danny had transferred in partway through the year, and to be fair, I met his Micronaut comics before I met him. Mr. Garret had taken them from him (most likely for reading them when Danny was meant to be doing math), and they were displayed along the black board. I thought / hoped they might be a prize for some sort of game and went to investigate. Danny became defensive of his goods. We had a brief moment of anger, and then became friends. Danny would go on to be one of my best friends. He would also introduce my brain to the idea of comic collecting. Not just reading, collecting. By now I had figured out that getting two or three issues in a row was possible, which was made even more possible by my having gained an allowance, giving me control of which comics I bought. Danny mentioned that he “collected” comics. So I asked my dad how I could become a comic collector. My father told me I should pick my favorite comic and focus on getting as many in a row as I could (which is not bad advice to give to a 12 year old). I knew right then I COULDN’T be a collector, because I could NEVER choose a favorite. Then Danny loaned me the comic that would make me a collector: X-Men # 138.
In that single issue, Cyclops tells the history of the X-men from the first issue through the tragic death of Jean Grey, The Phoenix, from the previous issue. (It was also the middle of a run of what are not only the best X-Men stories ever, but possibly the best superhero comics ever) I began collecting with issue 140. I fell completely in love with an “older woman”. I was 12 and she was “13½, cute, bright, spunky… and she walked through walls”. I was fascinated with “Days of Future Past”, and read the “Demon” X-mas issue so much, I had to buy a second one. I was now a collector. I still bought many comics for fun, BUT the X-Men, those I collected. Now I was a collector.
It took less than a year for me to start collecting other comic titles as well. In Jr. High, the X-Men and The Teen Titans helped me survive the bullies. My weekly trips to the local drug store ate my entire allowance each week. My love for Superheroes refused to die. Combined with my role-playing, comics had also doomed me to be a Champions-playing uber-geek. I read and collected and learned the back stories of 100’s of characters instead of doing homework. In high school, I still refused to put the comics down. In fact, now that my small town had grown our own 7-11, which was on my way home from high school, it now had a convenient place to pick up comics. There was also a comic bookstore in Victorville, Comics Castle, which was close enough to get to about once a month IF you could get a ride. This two-fisted punch of comic availability ATE my allowance like a lion eats a slow gazelle. Comics Castle opened just in time for me to keep buying Micronauts, which became “Direct Only” at about that time. The Teen Titans over shadowed the X-Men as my favorite comic due to consistently good art and writing. I figured out that was due to it having the same Writer / Artist team, Marv Wolfman and George Perez. Then, in early 1985, I saw a different book by the same team in the 7-11. It was called “Crisis on Infinite Earths”, and I knew it was going to change everything. I tried to explain to non-comics readers at the time how historical this new mini-series was going to be. Danny understood. The guys I played Champions with understood. Comics were about to enter a new age, and if you cared about such things, and we did, it was exciting.
When Crisis ended, so did the DC multiverse that had preceded it. The new DCU (now the old DCU or perhaps the “Tween-Crisis DCU”) restarted everything. It was a bold idea and it looked to me like comics were coming of age, right as I was. So my childhood and DC comics’ multiverse were over, and my slow slide from Marvel X-Guy, to DC JSA-guy had begun. At the time I thought that DC had thrown in the towel and admitted that Marvel was superior. Now a universe of stories later, I see that DC did the right thing. The ride has been great. I hope the next one is just as fun.
Bradleyman
(A quick note: I think BOTH DC and Marvel have put out TONS of great stuff over the years. I am a comic fan first. I like me a good comic story, no matter the world. My “slide” from Marvel to DC was spent liking both, or only caring enough to note which larger universe the book I reading was occurred in.)